The waterfall marked the boundary of Avel’s world. The river spread wide as it approached the mighty cliff face of the mountain, before plunging over it, down into the clouded lands beneath.
The cave his mother had told him about was under the cliff face, on the very edge of the waterfall. Avel saw where it was easily enough, looking along the line of the cliff. But the path down to the cave followed a very narrow, very steep, and very slippery ledge. It would be easy to fall, and if he did, there was nothing but cloud beneath.
Nevertheless, Avel followed the path down, though he was careful to keep a handhold on the cliff face at all times, in case he put a foot wrong. But he managed to get all the way to the cave without incident, arriving just as the sun began to shine directly against the cliff.
Avel cautiously went inside the cave and leaned his two spears against the wall, as was polite. It was dry inside, and the floor was covered in rushes that were no more than a week old. Avel smelled smoke, and as he went farther in, he saw a fire burning on a raised platform, most of the smoke going up through a hole in the ceiling.
Next to the fire, lying on a bed of rabbit skins, was a very, very old woman. Her long white hair trailed down from the bed, and her gnarled, crooked hands were folded on her breast. Her eyes were shut, and Avel could not tell if she was dead or alive.
‘Hello!’ called Avel, but the woman did not reply. Avel took a few steps forward, very slowly. He was remembering stories of ghosts and spirits, and there was not enough sun or firelight to banish the shadows in the cave. Not all the shadows looked as if they belonged there, and they did not move as they should when the fire flickered or the sunshine paled for a moment.
One of the woman’s hands suddenly moved. Avel jumped, his heart pounding. Still she did not speak, but she indicated for him to come forward. Avel obeyed, though he did not want to go any closer. He wanted to turn around and run.
When he stood next to her, she turned her head, just a little, and her eyes opened. They were a very light blue, a color unknown to Avel’s people, and clear. She smiled, which unnerved him, and in a voice so quiet that Avel had to bend close to hear it over the roar of the waterfall outside, she spoke.
‘I knew you would come. Take my place, with my blessing.’
She raised her hand again, there was a rattle in her breath, and then those light blue eyes dulled, and one eyelid drooped half-shut.
The wise woman of the waterfall was dead, before Avel could even ask his question.
Avel looked at the shadows. They seemed to him to be clustering closer, and he didn’t know what to do. The old woman had said, ‘Take my place,’ but he was not wise – he knew nothing beyond the everyday things that everyone knew. She must have thought he was someone else, Avel considered. The very old often saw things no one else saw.
The best thing to do would be to leave her here, he thought, and tell everyone what had happened. In time, someone wise would come to live in the cave, and Avel could ask his question then.
The question didn’t seem that important anymore, now he was here alone with the dead woman and the shadows of the cave. He felt an overpowering desire to hurry out of there, to get back to his village and return to his normal life.
Avel hurried from the cave. But he was in too much of a hurry, was too frightened by the shadows he felt were following at his heels. As he stepped out on the wet ledge, his sandal slipped. The hide strap around his ankle snapped. Avel spun halfway around, trying to rebalance himself, his fingers grasping at air instead of the cliff face.
With a despairing cry, he fell into the waterfall. For what felt like a never-ending time but in fact could only have been a minute or so he struggled to get a breath out of the all-encompassing water, and his legs and arms flailed, hoping against hope that he might grab something to stop his fall. Through it all he felt a more intense fear than any fear he had felt before, a fear that mercifully was soon replaced by unconsciousness as he failed to get his breath and failed to grab hold of anything.
He went into that darkness knowing that it must be his death. So when he found himself waking, and his breath coming into his mouth, he was bewildered. Surely ghosts did not breathe?
Avel was even more bewildered when he opened his eyes. Soft light fell upon his face, and he wasn’t in the waterfall, or even in a river. He was wrapped in furs, and there were people nearby, sitting with their backs to him. Slowly, every muscle aching, he sat up. One of the people – a man about his own age – turned around and said something to him, but it was gibberish, the words all sounding the same.
‘I am Avel,’ said Avel, before he passed out again.
The next time he awoke, Avel found himself on the back of a cart drawn by oxen. This was strange, for his people had neither carts nor oxen, but it was not the strangest thing. When he tried to sit up, he found heavy manacles of a reddish metal around his ankles, joined together by a chain of the same material. Later, Avel would come to learn that this metal was bronze, and that he was a slave. His rescuers had not dragged him from the water out of kindness, but because they thought that he might be a saleable commodity.
It was from the back of that cart that Avel had his last glimpse of the waterfall. It stretched up into the clouds, looking impossibly high. Later, when he had learned enough of the language of his captors to tell his tale, they would not believe he had fallen all the way down the waterfall. As far as they were concerned, the gods lived above the clouds. Avel was a liar and had simply fallen in the river, probably trying to escape from one of the lowland villages where he was already a slave.
Slaving was not the primary trade of the group that had taken Avel; they dealt in many different things, traveling between the villages of the lush lowlands all the way down to the great city where the river emptied into the sea. It was in this city that they sold Avel, and he became the slave of a merchant whose name was Sernam, though of course to Avel he was always simply ‘Master.’
For more than ten years Avel traveled as part of Sernam’s household. They went across seas, and through deserts, and over mountains, traveling from city to city. Avel learned five languages, three alphabets, and two systems of counting and arithmetic. He fell in love with a fellow slave, Hebela, and was heartbroken when she was sold to a trader, to be taken away to be sold again, a thousand miles away, beyond a desert uncrossable save with the secret knowledge of its oases and waterholes.
In the eleventh year of Avel’s slavery, Sernam’s ship was wrecked upon an unfamiliar shore. Only Avel survived, for he was the only one who knew how to swim, and even then, it was pure luck that the wind and tide conspired together to bring him ashore.
Taken in by more hospitable people than on his first near-drowning, Avel once more became a hunter in a mountain forest, a provider of meat to a village both like and unlike the one of his birth. The people had different colored eyes and skin, and spoke a different language, and lived in houses made of bricks rather than timber, but beyond that, they were much the same. Avel fell in love again, with a woman named Kikali, and together they built a new house of bricks, and in time Kikali bore three children, who Avel named after his long-lost brothers and sisters of the village in the high valley.
The children grew, the village prospered, and all was well – until one hot summer day when a caravan slowly shambled in, the mules, as always, going straight to drink at the great stone trough where a spring splashed out cold, fresh water from under the earth. But there was no one leading the mules. The caravan master was unconscious astride one mule, and apart from him, there was only a boy, who was tied across the very last mule and was already dead.
The villagers who helped the caravan master down from the mule died soon after he did, coughing until they could cough no more. After three days, everyone in the village was dead, all save Avel. He had coughed, and sweated, and shouted against invisible enemies, but he had lived.
As was the custom in that village, though it was not his own, Avel carried the bodies to the
hill and left them for the carrion-eating birds. It took a long time to take everyone, for he was weak from the sickness, and there were so many.
When he was done, he laid himself down with Kikali and his children and tried to be completely still, so the birds would come and eat him as well. But even though he did not move a muscle, the birds kept circling above and would not come down.
Eventually, Avel got up. The villagers had believed it was necessary for bodies to be eaten, otherwise they would become unhappy ghosts. Avel did not necessarily believe that, but he wasn’t sure.
He said a farewell in all the languages he knew, and walked away.
A year later, he was a slave again. He had walked to the coast and taken over an abandoned hut and a hide boat and become a solitary fisherman, until the day he and his catch were taken by a galley of triple-tiered oarsmen that had a ram of green-shrouded bronze.
Avel rowed in the galley for four months. It was hard and thirsty work, for there was never enough fresh water for all the rowers. But it was this need for fresh water that helped Avel escape, when the watering party he was with was surprised by enemies, who came riding out of the dunes as the slaves filled dozens of water casks at a beachside stream.
All the galley’s crew and guards were slain, and the slaves were taken to serve new masters. But Avel spoke the language of the raiders, as he had learned it from his first love, Hebela. So he was thought to be one of their own, and was given weapons and clothing, and joined their band.
Avel did not enjoy his time with the raiders. They roamed the coast, robbing and looting wherever they could, and they also took many slaves, selling them every full moon at a vast slave market on a beach, with the buyers’ ships riding offshore, beyond the breakers.
It was a dark of the moon, a year or more later, when Avel managed to leave the band, sneaking into the night on the back of a not-very-good horse.
A thousand miles away, the horse was exchanged for a sack of sugar-cured fruits and passage on a ship, and after a month at sea, Avel came to the city at the end of the river that was born of the great waterfall.
The sack of sugar-cured fruits was valuable in that city, enough for two horses and some odds and ends that might prove useful. Avel rode the horses in turn, never slackening his pace, following the river back to its source.
He came to the foot of the waterfall late in summer. The river was low, mud extending for many yards from its banks to the central channel. The waterfall, too, seemed less impressive, its mists thinner, and the clouds not quite so high above. But perhaps, thought Avel, it was simply that he had seen so many other waterfalls now.
He had also seen many mountains, and climbed them, in company and alone. He had learned how to find a way among and through rocks, and how to cut hand- and footholds in ice with a bronze pick.
Even so, the way was hard. There was not one cliff to climb, as he had thought, but many, and here he learned how he had survived his fall so long ago. The waterfall did not plunge straight down from the clouds. There were many waterfalls, and many pools, coming down the mountainside in giant steps.
Finally, Avel came to the top of the waterfall. He pulled himself up over the last lip of stone and looked out on the valley of his youth. It was exactly as he remembered it; nothing had changed. Only four days’ walk away he would find his mother, if she still lived, and his brothers and sisters, and all the folk he had once known so well.
He was keen to go on, but the sun was setting, and the air was already cool. Avel had forgotten how cold it could be, up in the valley, and he was very tired from the climb. He looked again, at the way he would go, and then turned about to walk along the edge of the waterfall.
It did not take long to find the path down to the wise woman’s cave. It was wider than he remembered, and there were marks on the stone that suggested someone had worked to make the way easier.
Avel hesitated at the cave entrance. There were two spears against the wall, marking the presence of a visitor. Then he remembered leaving his own spears there, and when he looked, he saw the obsidian points and recognized the patterns he had chipped himself. They were his spears, still in place after twenty years or more.
He took up his hunting spear, but the shaft was rotten and broke in his hands. The fighting spear fared no better. Avel let the broken pieces fall, keeping only the obsidian heads.
There were no fresh rushes on the floor, and the bed of rabbit skins was long gone, and with it the body of the wise woman. But there was a load of dry firewood laid ready on the raised stone, with an obsidian flint and tinder by it, though Avel used his own bronze firewheel for the spark. Then he unrolled his cloak and lay down. For a little while he looked at the obsidian spearpoints, turning them every which way against the light, and within moments was asleep.
He awoke soon after dawn, the cave still dark. It was cautious, quiet footsteps that had brought him from slumber. Avel had learned to sleep lightly among the raiders.
‘Careful, grandmother,’ whispered a voice by the cavemouth. A young man’s voice, speaking in the tongue of Avel’s people, the words sounding strange and familiar at the same time.
Avel sat up. He could see two silhouettes in the cave mouth. One, young and straight, the other bent and old, leaning on the first.
‘Who comes?’ he asked. He was used to speaking in different ways now, his tongue felt wrong, the shape of his mouth odd and uncomfortable. It made his voice much higher-pitched than usual.
‘We saw the smoke,’ said the young man. ‘And thought to see if a new wise woman had come to the cave at last.’
‘I am not a woman,’ answered Avel grumpily, his voice more his own. He stood up slowly and stretched, his muscles and joints aching from the waterfall climb. ‘Where did you come from? The village is days away.’
‘It was,’ said the bent silhouette. Her voice was weak and shaky, and she took a few steps forward, old eyes peering eagerly into the dark. ‘We moved down in the terrible winter, when the river froze.’
Avel stopped his stretching. His heart felt like it might rise up through his chest and come out his mouth, and he could not speak. He knew that voice.
‘I have a question,’ continued the old, bent woman. ‘Twenty-two summers ago, my son Avel came to ask the wise woman a question, and he was never seen again. What happened to him?’
Avel opened his mouth, shut it, and opened it again. He thought back across the years, of the joy and the misery, the happiness and the suffering, of Hebela and Kikali and his children, and of all the people he had loved, and liked, and hated, and feared, and everything in between.
‘He found the answer to his question,’ said Avel, as he walked forward, unable to even breathe, and held out his hands. As he reached the visitors, the rising sun peered in just enough to light up his face, and he embraced his mother.
‘And then he came home.’
Check Your Faint Heart at the Door
Stop!
THEY SPOTTED HIM AN HOUR after dawn, as the two jeeps drove along the ridge road. It was Anderson in the lead jeep who saw him, which was kind of ironic since he was the only one who wore glasses, sand-blasted GI-issue things with black frames a finger thick. He called out to stop, and Cullen stomped the brake so hard the jeep fishtailed off into the loose gravel and almost went over, and Breckenridge, driving the jeep behind, almost ran into them because he did the same thing.
When they finally stopped with the dust blowing back over the top of the vehicles, they debussed as per the S.O.P. and shook out into something approaching a line along the road, with Master Sergeant Karadjian shouting at them not to f—ing do anything unless he told them to, most particularly not to let their stupid fat f—ing fingers go anywhere near any f—ing triggers unless he f—ing well ordered them to shoot.
When the dust cleared, the guy Anderson had seen was still walking toward them. Just walking through the desert like it was some kind of park, or maybe a neighborhood he was visiting since he was done up in one of
those brown robes, the ones with the hood like the old Mexican monks wore, who ran the orphan school over near the border, but that was eighty miles away, so if it was one of those monks he’d walked a hell of a long way.
‘Okay, priest or whatever you are, stop right there!’ called out Karadjian. ‘Can’t you read?’
He meant the signs that peppered the Proving Ground, the ones that said the Army would shoot you if you came in. The man had to have seen the signs, not to mention climbed over at least three fences, the last one still just in sight, a steel blur shimmering in the heat haze, looking like a mirage only it was real, and twelve feet high with concertina wire hung all along the top, so who knew how the guy had got over it, or under it, which was more likely the way the ground was a bit unsteady due to previous tests.
‘I said stop!’ shouted Karadjian again and he racked the slide on his .45 and raised the pistol, aiming over the guy’s head. But either the guy couldn’t hear or he was nuts from the heat, because he kept on coming and he still kept on coming even after Karadjian fired one then two shots over his head.
Karadjian swore and quickly looked at the men then back at the approaching cretin and wished that he’d never signed back on again after Korea, but then you could never expect what was going to happen in the f—ing Army from one day to the next, and before you knew it you had to shoot a damned priest or a monk or whatever and he’d been brought up Orthodox and his mother would never forgive him—
‘Stop or I will shoot to kill!’ he shouted. The idiot was only twenty feet away now, just walking with his head down, Karadjian couldn’t even see his face, though maybe that was better, and then he was taking aim and tap-tap two rounds straight into the chest and the guy didn’t fall down!
‘Crap! Anderson! Four rounds rapid!’ barked Karadjian as he fired another two shots, this time at the man’s head. Anderson fired too, his M1 a higher, sharper report, bang-bang-bang-bang. The fourth round was a tracer and they all saw it go straight through the guy, chest-high, no doubt about it.